In Austen-L and Janeites
today, Diane Reynolds wrote the following about her (accidental) fictional namesake:
"and then ... if we want to believe the subtextual reading that Wickham is
not precisely lying and Mrs. Reynolds (the housekeeper, not moi!) is fos, the
screw turns yet again...”
Diane, it took me two
minutes to realize what you meant by "fos" --at first, I thought that
might be "false" in Dutch, or something innocent like that, and then
it hit me, you were using text-speak, and I was, so to speak, ROFLMAO!
And...it was SO
Austenesque of you, because I believe part of your concealed meaning was that
we know for sure that if JA had lived in the era of text-messaging, she would
have viewed it as a veritable gold-mine for wordplay of all sorts, where the
dirty meaning would be concealed just enough from innocent eyes, while knowing eyes
would understand!
And….to turn to your
substantive comment about Mrs. Reynolds, as, in slightly more polite terms,
lying through her teeth in verbally painting a too-glowing-to-be-true portrait
of her master (just as her intentional namesake, Joshua Reynolds, as my posts
last month illustrated, was very much of a panderer to the pedophilic leanings
of his most lucrative patron, the perverted Duke of Dorset at Knole), I will
repeat the relevant portion of what i posted just the other day about the
covert allusion to Lovers Vows which
I detected in Pride & Prejudice,
which PROVES that Jane Austen meant for Mrs. Reynolds's praise to be plausibly
interpretable in two OPPOSITE ways!:
So as we are now talking
about the young Baron Wildenhaim, you may reasonably ask, what does that aristocratic
young cad have to do with another Austen novel besides Mansfield Park? Well, if you pored over that passage as carefully
as I did, your Janeite eyes should have paused and then widened several times with
recognition at the following statements by Cottager and his Wife, in describing
the young Baron Wildenhaim:
First,
Cottager, who tries to put a positive spin on the Baron’s behavior and so says:
“…We regretted his absence much, and his arrival has caused great joy … when he
became an officer, he was rather wild, as most young men are…….
And
second, Cottager’s Wife, who feels guilty about glossing over ugly truths about
the Baron, even as she still loves him. So, under pressure from her husband, she first says: “…he, bless him, our
good Baron is still the same as when a boy….”
But then, overriding her husband’s censorship—he perhaps fearing
reprisal from his master, the Baron--she courageously follows her conscience
and blurts out her true feelings:
“Yes,
I remember when he fell in love with poor Agatha, Friburg's daughter: WHAT A PIECE OF WORK THAT WAS--It did not do him
much credit. That was a wicked thing…. it
was very wicked!”
Do
you hear the Austenian echoes now? I think they’re obvious! But if not, just
compare the above quoted snippets spoken by Cottager’s Wife in particular to
the following statements made by ANOTHER plain spoken old woman of low status
living near a great estate, whose words, unlike Cottager’s Wife’s, you probably
know by heart:
"He is now gone into
the army," she added; "but I am afraid he has turned out very
wild."
["Is your master much
at Pemberley in the course of the year?" ] "Not so much as I could
wish, sir; but I dare say he may spend half his time here…”
"I
have never known a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever
since he was four years old…But I have always observed, that they who are
good-natured when children, are good-natured when they grow up; and he was
always the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted boy in the world."
Of course these are all the
famous words of Mrs. Reynolds in P&P, and I think you will agree that there
are just too many points of correspondence between Cotttager’s Wife’s words and
Mr. Reynolds’s words to be a coincidence, ESPECIALLY when we take into account
that Mrs. Norris speech shows us that JA was alert to usages of Hamlet’s famous
phrase in Lover’s Vows, and so would
have actually read the above quoted descriptions provided by Inchbald.
For starters, Mrs. Reynolds is speaking to Lizzy
who has just arrived in the vicinity of Darcy’s great estate, just as Agatha is
then for the first time in twenty years within a stone’s throw (as in the
stone Frederick threatens to cast at the
inhospitable landlord).
But….what’s very VERY strange
indeed is that Cottager’s Wife descriptions of the Baron which I have quoted
above seem to correspond to Mrs. Reynolds’s descriptions of BOTH Darcy AND
Wickham!
So why did JA go out of
her way to have Mrs. Reynolds, like some master Chef in Wonderland, cut the character
of the Baron in half, and sprinkle the good parts on Darcy, but the bad ones on
Wickham? The very absurdity of that image made me realize that I had been
reminded (and I am sure, NOT coincidentally) of the following two very famous
comments by Lizzy about Darcy and Wickham:
"This will not
do," said Elizabeth; "you never will be able to make both of them
good for anything. Take your choice, but you must be satisfied with only one.
There is but such a quantity of merit between them; just enough to make one
good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting about pretty much. For my
part, I am inclined to believe it all Darcy's; but you shall do as you
choose."
"There certainly was
some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got
all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it."
JA might just as well have
added the name “Baron Wildenhaim” to both of these epigrams, it’s so clear that
they are her winks in his specific direction!
And I promise this is not
the last you will hear from me on this subject, and in particular my
explanation for why Mrs. Reynolds seems to speak about BOTH the Darcy and the
Wickham in the wicked Baron Wildenhaim (or should I have written WICKenHAM?)
–to say nothing about the Frederick Wentworth in Frederick Fribourg! ;)
I could go on for pages
setting forth my own interpretations of the significance of this lopping and
cropping of Cottager’s Wife’s speeches about the Baron. However, beyond making
the simple point that I consider this to provide extraordinarily strong support
for my claim that P&P (like all of JA’s novels) is a double story, for now
I will leave it to let you, gentle readers, to draw your own inferences.
So thanks again, Diane,
for providing the perfect context for the above.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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